TAMPA, Fla. — You can help fight climate change by changing what you eat for one meal each day. That’s according to a student at Middleton High School in Tampa, who created the “Green Palate Project.”

The project encourages people to swap out one of their normal meals for a plant-based meal every day.

What You Need To Know

  • Middleton High School's Rishi Patel created the Green Palate Project to fight climate change

  • The Green Palate Project encourages you to eat one plant-based meal each day

  • Patel discovered that by not eating meat, he alone has helped avoid nearly 52,000 miles of greenhouse gas and saved over 20 tennis courts of forests

Rishi Patel is a Junior at Middleton High School. “I’m interested in pursuing law and political science and right now, I’m at Middleton as a biomedical student,” he said.

Patel has big plans for his future, but he’s not wasting any time in the present, starting with lunch.

“Today I’m eating spaghetti, but this spaghetti is actually made of almond flour, so it’s grain free,” he said.

Meat was missing from the main dish. Patel is Hindu, and part of his faith is vegetarianism, so he’s grown up not knowing any different. 

Last year, Patel says he started looking into the impact of vegetarianism on the environment. Patel found that by not eating meat, he alone has helped avoid nearly 52,000 miles of greenhouse gas and saved over 20 tennis courts of forests. He decided he needed to spread the word, and the Green Palate Project was born.

“We present in classrooms about the benefits of having a plant-based diet, and how this diet actually supports the environment and is a sustainable way of living compared to having meat on a daily basis,” he said.

Once he’s finished lunch, Patel visits the Green Palate Project website he created. There, participants log their plant-based meals. He said even one meal per day makes a difference.

“Many people think that to make a tangible impact on climate change, you have to go out and buy expensive solar panels, or you have to buy an expensive car that’s electrically run, but that’s not the case,” he said. “You can change climate change, you can help change climate change by harnessing your diet.”

So far, people have logged over 2,800 plant-based meals. Patel says he’s just getting started and his goal is to share part of his faith with the world in an effort to help save it — living harmoniously with your environment.